Outcomes - Seminar 22
Full transcription of delegate debate

Speakers:

• Peter Murray, Director Yorkshire Sculpture Park
• Dr. Helen Rees Leahy, Senior Lecturer in Museology and Director of the Centre for Museology at the University of Manchester
• Seminar Moderator: Dr. Polly Binns, Research Professor in Visual Culture, Buckinghamshire Chiltern University College

Introduction: Dr. Polly Binns

Can I welcome everybody into this second and very important stage of the afternoon.

What I would like to say, an observation - spending some time on the train coming up, I looked through the delegates list and I did one of those simple mathematical exercises, I looked and I thought who’s here as a professional practitioner, who’s here as a curator, who’s here as someone from a museum? And out of about 40 of us here today, I think we can add ourselves up to something like nearly 70 because of the way we overlap in our constituencies, we have many different hats, many of us, we’re academics, we’re practitioners, we’re curators. And so in a way how we can contribute to the debate is quite complex, and what I’d really appreciate is if those of you when you’re talking, is if in a way you could say in a way what hat you’re talking with. Are you talking from a maker’s point of view or a curator’s or arts administration or academic or whatever, because we have all these different sort of points to present.

The other thing about the afternoon it’s very much an information gathering afternoon as well, and we would really welcome references to examples, to case studies, to specific examples when we’re talking about good practice or comment or experience or whatever.

In your packs there are points to be raised at the context seminar. What I have been asked to explain is these are very much a starting point, ways of us beginning to look at the interests we have, to do large events, that are all leading us towards the next seminar at the V&A which will be very much about collaboration, but as Helen has so eloquently demonstrated to us already, context and collaboration are totally interwoven, no pun intended. And so we are going to be talking in very similar territories.

And we do want please everybody to contribute. This is very much our opportunity. We are a very experienced constituency. There is a huge amount of knowledge and expertise in this room and it is this knowledge and expertise that can begin to take this debate in a direction so that we can begin to develop some clear strategies to identify ways forward for us to consider how textile can be looked at across the three very often diverse arenas of the museum sector and higher level education and the role of the practitioner, the artist.

I would just break a lot of this down when we’re talking about interventions in collections, whether we’re talking about participating in specific exhibitions, if we’re talking about site-specific pieces that are going to the environment on a permanent basis. We’re talking so much about place, base, and context.

So is there anybody who would like to kick off from a case study point of view, anyone who has perhaps had an experience of siting work or being involved in an intervention in a museum?

Laura Hamilton, Collins Gallery.

Speaking from a curator point of view but not with a permanent collection. I was quite interested in what was said about siting work badly or well and how artists wanted it fitting in. We recently acquired a large sculpture, which had actually been made way back in 1985, and, it was something that was made under a completely different title. It was called ‘Just in Case’, and it was sited first of all in the Glasgow Garden Festival, and then it moved off to Berlin, and then it went off to New York, so lots of Glaswegians knew about this thing.

We have acquired a site from a very well loved and known Victorian maternity hospital and we were looking for something to put in it. Rather than commission something we did try and see what was available, because we don’t have a lot of money, apart from anything else, and this sculpture had been lying redundant in the artist’s garden and it was a big safety pin. Seemed perfect, and the proportions and everything else, the materials were very good.

It took about three years to persuade the City and the University of Strathclyde that this was an appropriate piece. Eventually we sited it, proportionally it looked great with everything else, but we weren’t quite sure, it was called Maternity, but in Greek so that it wasn’t an obvious labeling. People were still baffled within the university, why we had put a safety pin there. We didn’t bother explaining it, but within three weeks the first posy was laid at the base of this safety pin, and, the people of Glasgow decided that it was an icon for the hospital and became a memorial for children born there and children who’d died there. And it’s now become one of Glasgow’s most favoured … favourite sculptures. So I’m just talking about different contexts from work that already exist, and if you move it, it takes on a completely different persona.

Peter Murray

I could give you an example of Barbara Hepworth. We have a Barbara Hepworth on loan from the Tate, and when I was a student it used to stand in the corner of the Tate and I thought it was one of the most boring pieces of sculpture I had ever seen in my life. And we borrowed it for an exhibition, the Tate has now kindly loaned it to the Sculpture Park and it just looks fantastic. It really does because it was taken out of the cupboard and we have put it in the right place, so again the location is so important and you can transform everything by doing this.

Ian Dumelow, Head of University College of the Creative Arts at Epsom.

I just wanted to add a couple of reflections on what the speakers have said so far in a sense to pick up the previous comment, and part of that was a plea that we don’t interpret those particular words of collaboration and context too narrowly. In picking up that previous contribution I’ve just come back with Lesley from the Nuno exhibition in Haslach in Austria. And I was struck that actually the context for the exhibition was a set of civic traditions and histories, and an entire environment which changed entirely the way that we viewed the work, which had been seen both in the university college and in Sleaford. So I think context can be seen in a much, much broader set of terms than the ones that perhaps we immediately interpret it in.

Likewise collaboration, we talked about artists and museums, Museums and HEIs. But it seems to me that we can view collaboration over a much wider area than that with a number of other partners included.

And then finally just to say that I think the key to so much of this is in brokerage, and I’m delighted to hear Peter talking about residencies, I think those are vital in terms of putting the artist at the centre of that brokerage experience, but also of course researchers and curators. And if anything comes from this symposium, I would hope it’s ways to expand the opportunities for brokerage, in a number of different ways. I think that’s the key really to building up on the dialogue which Lesley and the symposium started.

Trish Bould

Speaking as an artist for the time being, I wanted to add into the pot the context of a project that I was working on, I’ve worked on as an artist on a series of projects which have involved a lot of experience within a project as well as specific outcomes. And within the context of one of the projects I was working on, which involved visiting, looking at the construction of a building, I took a part of a loom on site, as a means for having a conversation, which at the time I was having a lot of difficulty with. I was visiting the site as women and trying to have conversations with people who were constructing the building. And they had mainly been interested in the length of the lens of the camera rather than having a proper conversation. And having taken part of a loom in, we then were able to have really interesting conversations about craft and about making and about construction, through a dialogue between the way that the loom was made, and they were interested in the actual making of the loom and their role on the site, so just a different way of thinking about object.

Sue Lawty, practitioner

Mainly what I want to talk about is collaboration, not context, but I was actually thinking when you just said about the context of work, I was asked to do two commissions for the Foreign Office for the British High Commission in Accra in Ghana. The brief was to be based on the built environment, and I made one that was a kind of an aerial view of London really, but quite abstracted, and the other one was the rural environment, and for that I did, from my own sketches, something that was based on Howarth Moor in Yorkshire so it was very sketchy, and there was a broken down stone wall and sort of rain but it was all very kind of sketchy and abstract. And to me it was a very definite image… well, not definite in the sense that it was photographic, but definite in the sense that I knew the context very much of where it came from.

When they were shipped out to Africa and went into the British High Commission I went too, and the tiles were being laid, the paint was being painted, it was a new building. And a lot of Ghanaians were looking at the work as it was going up and they all thought that the one of Howarth Moor - which was this really sketchy landscape and very, rather vague landscape - was actually huts, and they saw the broken down stone wall as huts. They read it completely differently. And it really made me realize how much the context of the work that you do, you’re so steeped in it, it’s sometimes difficult to think of another sphere. But by taking it to a different part of the world and having a different culture look at that, without the knowledge, their landscape is so different that it had a completely different feel for them.

Maureen Wayman Manchester Metropolitan University

I wanted to comment a little bit on what one of the speakers said earlier. When I was a student I remember spending a lot of time in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the John Soane’s Museum, where I always had the feeling that everything was there and everything was out on show, that there really wasn’t a story. That what he collected was all there. And that’s what I looked for, and looked at, and absolutely loved. And I think it’s probably the time I spent in that particular museum which I saw as being somewhere that was almost like an extension of my own student space, that then sort of went on to have a very strong influence on the way that I worked, because I don’t actually live with a lot of space and I don’t actually … well, never actually worked with a lot of space. I could never actually leave space and sort of know when to stop. I would always just carry on. And even now, the space that I live in is almost grotto-like because I just fill it and fill it and fill it until I just have to take it all down and start again.

So that effect that exhibitions and museums and galleries can have on you at a very early stage and stayed with you I think is really quite important.

And I think, going on from that, our particular university is one that collects, and then specializes in concealing. The university has some wonderful things, but we seem to make a specialty out of preventing people from seeing them, so all the locks are on the doors and things are concealed on the third floor in the All Saints Building. And I think that what we’re doing now is we’re working more with our friends and colleagues in the city in order to take that sort of silo effect away. And to take the walls away. So that when a student applies to our university I always feel that they’re not just applying to MMU but they’re applying to Manchester and everything that Manchester and the region has to offer to enrich the time and the experience they have when … when they are actually following a programme within a university and moving towards a qualification.

I think things can be planned, and things can be placed. And sometimes I think that when we or when I try to manage things or I try to organize and engineer and plan things for a particular purpose, something quite different happens and that’s the sort of surprise and wonder. And I think that when we were actually looking at appointing people in recent times to try and enrich the research profile of the university and therefore enrich the environment that people were working in, we put people like sort of two people at the back of the room over here in place within the textile area, and quite extraordinary things happen. So you don’t get that very cold lift in terms of the research profile, but what you get is an enrichment. It acts like a catalyst within those spaces, where quite extraordinary things happen, and that to me is very exciting.

So you put Alice Kettle working in the workshops as a sort of an intervention, if you like, and curious things happen to the students and the staff that are working alongside her. And the same thing has happened in other areas of the faculty, where we’ve started to make a lot of books. And people who have never made books or even had an interest in making books, all of a sudden are making books. And those books are at the moment travelling the world, they’re in July 2006 Mexico, back in Manchester in 2007. But we’ve had a bookbinder within our faculty for about fifteen or twenty years, and very, very little has happened in that area. But you put in a resident, or you put in, you make arrangements for a residency to happen, and all of a sudden everything starts to change.

So I think it’s very important that at the moment the way in which we’re thinking about art schools and what they are, and what they look like, in terms of buildings or even more importantly the people who populate them, I think it’s about time that the art schools were there not really just for the students, or for the staff that work in them, but are there for everybody that has an interest in them.

Jennifer Harris, Whitworth Art Gallery

Increasingly I realise what I do is I work with a very big collection, historical and contemporary collection, but what I think my main interest is, is interrogating that collection and re-configuring it and re-contextualising it in a whole variety of different ways. It seems to me in the last five to ten years we’ve had quite an interesting variety of ways that we’ve done this: commissioning, for example. When Caroline Bartlett worked with us over a six to twelve month period, my brief for her was to work with the collections and she ended up actually looking at museum practice, rather than the collections per se, or she did both but the piece is more about museum practice.

We’ve also gone down the other route where an artist comes in, and Michael Brennand-Wood’s here today, and uses the collection, to move their own work on. And to do an exhibition out of that. But recently there’s been another couple of ways of working with those collections with practitioners. One of them was to bring in an artist to curate something, but where the actual piece of curation became the piece of art. And I know that’s becoming increasingly common where the curating is the practice.

And then the example that June very kindly posted on the context and collaboration website was working with Jane Harris the digital artist. What she did essentially was help us to interpret a quite difficult, in some ways, collection of early medieval clothing. And so I think there’s a whole range of ways of going this.

And my other thought was that you could almost keep doing the same exhibition over and over again if you could. I have just spoken at a seminar about looking at re-viewing William Morris, and I actually used two examples, but it occurred to me that I’d done it three times already in twenty years, and, whereas I said last time, when it was working with an artist I’d never do it again, it actually struck me that it might be quite interesting to keep on doing it, because as I was showing the slides at this seminar I realized that actually the same tapestry … and this only just occurred to me giving the seminar, that one of the tapestries had appeared in all three exhibitions without me realizing it.

Michael Brennand-Wood, practitioner

From a personal perspective basically I’ve always been someone who’s been interested in contested areas of textile practice, so I have purposefully worked with things like lace and recently floral imagery and pattern making, things which basically people have problems with. And one of the things that’s occurred to me as people have been talking today is that whole relationship between the idea of the context and the audience, and again I’ve always been someone who’s been interested in developing new audiences, because on a kind of primal level you can turn people onto things they’ve basically never seen before.

To me there isn’t this kind of benign audience that’s moving around the country looking for something interesting to see. And one of the things I think that’s absolutely crucial is that audiences are actually predisposed in one sense or another to visit certain things. And one of the things I think that we’re trying to deal with is how do you engage a new audience. So it’s not just, here are the objects in the room, this is what you can draw from this exhibition, it’s getting them there in the first place, to actually go and look at a textile exhibition, without essentially, a great deal of cultural baggage.

And one of the things which I think will mark a real sense of maturity is when we get shows which are organized in relation to a theme or a core idea or a series of arguments, and a not organized by media, which still persists. I think that really is a very fundamental way of breaking down people’s preponderance to judge what people do by the media. And there is, as I say, a great deal of cultural baggage that actually comes with textiles, so, basically I think is something I’d like to throw into the mix is - what is the audience? Thanks.

Helen Rees Leahy

I really agree with that. I think one of the things that YSP does, you go there and find some words sticking out of plant pots, or you might find some very fine twine demarcating a space in a very gentle way, or you might find some lights in a tree. I don’t know what people think of as being sculpture, but this is a pretty kind of expansive view, and I think also the landscape itself is permissive. And that is a fantastic thing for bringing people in to have at this kind of encounter, who might not go into a conventional gallery. I think that’s absolutely right, not to allow labels to become divisive and off-putting as they so frequently do.

I’d also like pick up on what Maureen was thinking if I may about the Sir John Soane Museum because that really what Peter was talking about earlier, and that’s about curating as choreography, and I think that’s a really nice way of thinking about the context of space and object and the dialogue between objects, and I love the way that Soane himself throughout his life as he lived in that house that he then re-named a museum, was always moving the objects in a sense, you know, the Sir John Soane Museum we see today happens to be a particular snapshot, but he was always, like you, his grotto was filling and he always had to re-deploy it creating those dialogues which are about space, and they’re about light and … and the kind of sensory and kinesthetic experiences that the objects and the spaces create.

And that’s what you’re doing on a different scale again at YSP, you move a piece, you see it in a new light. You talked about choreography, Peter, in terms of that very … so I love that word, it feels very kind of sensory in lots of ways.

Peter Murray

Yes, yes I think it is. I’m just dwelling also on what Michael said there about what is the audience? That is really quite fundamental to everything we do. And, one of the reasons why it’s so important to me, I mean, obviously my living depends on it apart from anything else, but we didn’t have an audience, you know, there wasn’t an audience for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, so, we actually had to create and audience. And I think that’s interesting. It suddenly just dawned on me that we never had an audience, there was no audience, I mean the park was a private park, it wasn’t open to the public, so we had to generate an audience, and it’s quite interesting how that has evolved over a period of time.

And one of the things that we try to do all the time is create new audiences. We were talking together the other day, Michael and I, about different types of projects and things that we might try and do, because I think … I don’t know what it’s like at the Whitworth or what it’s like at the Manchester Art Gallery, but the breakdown of our audience is quite interesting in the sense that a lot of people who come to us don’t go to art galleries and museums. A lot do of course, and we get international visitors as well, but it’s quite interesting that because of the atmosphere we’ve created, we do get people who definitely, you know, wouldn’t dream of going to Whitworth Art Gallery or wouldn’t dream of going to the theatre. And I’m not quite sure how we’ve done that, so I think what the audience is and how you generate the audience is something which is really quite crucial.

Victoria Mitchell, Norwich School of Art and Design

I think that there are some hybrid bits and pieces, I’ve got several things to say. One of the things that concerns me is do with education and is to do with how textiles works within education. It hasn’t in a sense got the same traditions as sculpture, which are kind of embedded in the time of Plato’s academy or wherever. It hasn’t got that long tradition within what is regarded as kind of education with a sort of top hat on. And I think that what I’ve been hearing today in the undercurrents of the conversations in between our very brilliant speakings and speakers is that we’re a little bit threatened, the idea for example that there is a sort of textile art, or a textile artist, there are … I’m hearing sort of little noises which suggest that within education that notion of the textile artist is not as secure as it has perhaps seemed, on its upward journey over the last ten or twenty years. Anyway I’ll just leave that one side for another conversation somewhere else.

I’m interested in the way in which, I really like the John Soane example and I was thinking … about how textiles, again not like sculpture, but also like sculpture, because sculpture does this terribly well, and sculptors are often invited to do it, is the way that textiles is brilliant at intervening within museum spaces, it has fantastic skills as kind of positioning itself I think, probably several practitioners here have worked in that way, at making sense of histories, of making links between objects, at creating kind of narratives and connections.

Textile also is brilliant in referring back to itself and taking itself forward in the present, so re-inventing histories through the present. It’s very strong at connecting across time and through space and between places and objects. And one of the things that we’ve been doing in Norwich, which is I think perhaps relevant here, with some funding from the higher education and innovation funding council, we have managed to set up something called the Norwich Textile Project with Norfolk Museum Service, and one of the most interesting aspects of that with Kathy Terry from Norfolk Museum Service, we came on a visit in the early stages of this project to the north of England including Manchester, to look at how in the north of England museums related their textiles to the cit, how they created the dialogue between textile and the city. What was very interesting was that Kathy and I got on terribly well socially, but, for virtually the whole of the journey, it was very hard for her having come out of people’s social history, with responsible for textiles in Norwich, it was very hard for her to understand what it was that went on in an art school. Art schools produce Tracy Emin, they didn’t produce what she was used to working with in terms of the costume and textile history, which she looks after.

And it was only on our way back just we were driving down the A1, where we had a conversation about the way in which the social … in which something to do with the way that textiles could work, to create … connect … to create new audiences for textiles. So let’s say that if you could somehow link Norwich, its history, the past and the present through the histories and through contemporary practitioners. So we did find a way in which textiles could create that bridge.

And one of the ways in which we’ve done that, which is not a context that perhaps, is so far away from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. One of the ways we’ve done this is through a website. And it’s on that website that we’ve managed to bring together different constituencies, both contemporary practitioners and historians, textile historians and people who are interested in the city of Norwich, and practices, sort of both past and present.

And so the website as a site, I think it isn’t the answer to everything at all, but it is a way of perhaps providing new audiences. It’s another kind of intervention if you like.

But yes, the artist that comes to mind in linking the two bits of my conversation, the bit about the artist and the bit about the Norwich website, is the Australian artist Narelle Jubelin. And, one of the things that she has done so well is to have used textiles, traditional textiles, to speak of histories and in her particular instance, of the history of colonialism in Australia. But she does it in a way which I think puts textiles, contemporary textiles and textile histories, into a very, very intelligent frame of reference where they can be understood from a museum context, from an artist context, and from an academic context so that textiles has its place in institutions, that can be looked at rather than trodden on. So just coming back to that first point about how the artist can be threatened in today’s textile education …………..

Marlene Little, University of Central England

First an observation really. Probably wearing a hat of a new ventures co-curator with Alex Boyd from Mac for depth of field conversations between photography and textiles, which is an exhibition currently touring the country with 15 contributors in UK, Australia and New Zealand established and emerging, Michael Brennand-Wood having some work in the exhibition, and it’s concluding at Lighthouse at Poole today. And has been at Mac in Birmingham and will travel to Harley at Welbeck and Q Arts at Derby.

And the observation is the delight in the exhibition, in the venues that chose to take the exhibition, because, whilst one would expect Mac and Harley to be interested in an exhibition of this nature, I think Poole had not taken a textile exhibition before, and were interested in taking it partly to enlarge their audience participation, and of course Q Arts at Derby is essentially a multimedia photography venture. So also that venue taking it on is very encouraging. And also from visitors at Mac, the number of people who are willing to travel to it having heard about it, and interested in moving their practice in slightly different directions and wanting to see how some of these issues were being dealt with by a number of practitioners. So that’s really an observation in that sense.

And then turning to I’m not quite sure what hat I’d wear for this next one because it’s general interest, which is picking up on Michael’s point earlier, and it’s a question to Peter, really, picking up on your comment about audiences. I found the informative nature of that visual narrative of your presentation fantastic. But I am absolutely intrigued by that off the cuff comment that preceded it, which was that you felt you’d left out most of the things that might be of interest to you, i.e. us as an audience here today. So that leads me to a series of rolling questions I suppose which would be given that this is the audience at the moment but this is going to be disseminated to a much wider audience, what are your perceptions of what this audience is? Why do you have those perceptions? Why did you make that comment, where does this lead us to, I’m intrigued, please.

Peter Murray

One of the things you should never do is make off the cuff remarks. No, it was a bit of an off the cuff comment really, but I was looking at slides, you know, we’ve got about nine million slides and about ten million digital images, so it’s always quite difficult to decide what to bring. And one of the things I was looking at was the idea of collaboration, of bringing images that showed collaboration between different disciplines. And, they just didn’t look that good, the slides, actually. The collaboration was good but the slides didn’t have such an impact, you see, so I decided that I would bring first of all a couple of images to a little bit about context. But then also images which had a sense of wonder about them in the sense that, if you haven’t been in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park it’s to tempt you to go there, and also to have that image of what it’s like to have work in the 18th century landscape. So that was the reason I made that remark.

Marlene Little

I was intrigued by what had triggered off the remark.

Peter Murray

Well I think I was trying to think of something to say really. But also one of the artists I’ve worked with Magdalena Abakanowicz I know her very well. We did a fantastic show, we had 90 pieces of sculpture by Magdalena. And, at that time we didn’t have a gallery, well, not a major gallery, we had a pavilion. Now if we’d had the underground gallery, we would have shown many of Magdalena’s fabric pieces, her thread pieces, which I think are fantastic, you know, incredibly powerful. I saw a retrospective by Magdalena in Warsaw about 10, 12 years ago and it was the most incredible, incredibly powerful exhibition. The business about … do you say fabric or textile, you know, the history of going backwards and forwards and so on, incredibly powerful.

I was looking for a few slides by Magdalena from that retrospective but I decided would only show things in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Greta Krypczyk-Oddy, Harris Museum and Art Gallery

Currently I’m cataloguing the fashion plate collection at the Harris and I’m also assisting Amanda Draper, who is the keeper of decorative art, curating our embroidery exhibition that starts next year. I’ve been very interested in the idea of gallery space. The gallery in Preston is a neoclassical building, late 19th century neoclassical building which is very, very imposing. And who uses this building? It was built originally for … and it says over the doorway: the mental riches you acquire here will live with you always.

Now, it’s been noted throughout from the 19th century up to now that, who uses this space are, white middle class, if I may say so, which is not entirely the broad audience that we would want.

Last year we had an exhibition which was curated by a lecturer from the University of Central Lancashire, and it was called After a Fashion, and it was fashion plates meet contemporary art, and the fashion plates which, speaking of context, were taken out of context because they were originally in women’s magazines of the early 19th century, they are taken out of there and on the wall as works of art. There were three graduates from the University of Central Lancashire who did pieces in response to the themes on these fashion plates. I was also working as information assistant in the gallery when this exhibition was on, and the audience was very interesting, that most of the people came in and looked at the contemporary art and ignored the fashion plates. That was my first observation, which was the idea of the exhibition or part of the idea was to get a new audience in to see the contemporary art.

The frequent question, again with textiles, we do have a textile gallery, but the question often is with contemporary art as with contemporary art and textile contemporary art is: is it art, is it craft, is it art? These are the questions that I have been asked working as an information assistant.

I feel that the context of the art being hidden away, visitors go into a gallery, then they have to go into different rooms, which is a totally different concept to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Also with the Yorkshire Sculpture Park the part that I found very interesting, well, it was all very interesting but part of it was that then, in 1977, contemporary art and sculpture, contemporary sculpture, was viewed possibly in the same was as contemporary textile art in that sculpture was seen as something classical and the contemporary sculpture didn’t fit that definition, in the same way as contemporary textile art doesn’t fit the definition of textile.

Fiona Curran, practitioner and teacher at the Manchester Metroplitan University

I suppose I have something of a question really rather than simply a comment, and I think the thing that has emerged for me out of many of the discussions that have taken place today, is to do with how we define context. And we talked about context a lot in terms of place and space and site, and I suppose my question is more to do with the notion of language and discourse, and how much do we think that language and discourses constitute a context, and are they inextricably bound together or do the two things sort of come one before the other.

I was thinking for example about what Peter said in relation to Yorkshire Sculpture Park and how when it started there was not a context for contemporary sculpture. And I wondered if, in setting up the sculpture park, did you also sort of encourage a kind of discourse to emerge around that site and place, to disseminate the ideas and the thoughts about it. I don’t know if anybody has any thoughts on that and wants to answer, to join the debate, but that was my question.

Peter Murray

We must have done that really because the … well, when you say did we establish a discourse, do you mean within the wider community, do you mean within the artistic community, the academic community or what?

Fiona Curran

Well I suppose in a sense that’s part of what I’m talking about in the sense of how we give legitimacy almost to our practice. In this context we’re talking about textiles. And I think that maybe raises the point that there are a number of discourses, aren’t there, there’s a number of different languages. There’s one that is to do with your peer group, and then there’s one to do with the new audiences that you want to engage with at the wider public context, and, do we need to recognise that language is an important part of constituting specific contexts and engagements with forms of visual practice.

Peter Murray

I think the language is terribly important, that discourse is very important. I don’t know what it’s like in textiles but in terms of sculpture what it was like in the late 70s is that there was a very, very strong opposition to certain types of sculpture from within the artist community. There were people who had almost an aesthetic Marxist approach to it, and some would have almost like a militant tendency approach to how you made a sculpture. I’m talking in the classical terms, so that was quite fascinating to suddenly take the lid off. The discourse that was actually taking place within the discipline which was in a sense, almost taking the sculpture apart. It emerged from the art language, there was the St Martin’s heavy metal school where you had to make a piece of sculpture every two seconds, you were making sculpture almost like drawing. Richard Serra draws every day, he draws all the time because it’s very important to his practice, and one got the impression from St Martin’s that one had to make sculpture all the time, without pausing for breath.

So it was quite amazing, the hate mail I got was unbelievable, not so much from the local community although there a bit of that, but from artists! Quite amazing. And the whole business of a plinth - I used to get letters from artists. Things like: please promise me you will not put sculpture on plinths in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and Please assure me you are not a curator who believes in the plinth. There was a lot of debate.

But the other thing that we had to do was we had to find our own model. We were motivated … I haven’t got time to go into it all but I was personally motivated by the whole idea of making art accessible. That is what was the motivation behind the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It’s an educational thing, I’m very involved in education. And I believe that the aesthetic side of art education is as important as the practical side of art education. So there was a bit of that, but it was also to do with making art accessible, and taking art out of galleries. I love galleries, I love museums, but I was looking at alternative spaces so there was all that sort of thing. And we had to create a dialogue with other countries where the sculpture park had a major influence from Holland and from Denmark….. So there were a lot of different debates and different dialogues and discourses.

But just one last thing on it, and that is that it’s amazing how things have changed, and it’s interesting when you are talking about textiles and what is it you should be doing. I mean sculpture now is an umbrella term, it’s very difficult to define sculpture, it’s an umbrella term which for me would include many people in this room.

Polly Binns

Can I just bring Helen Rees Leahy into this discussion because you equally must in a way spend and have a lot of debate about critical language and discourse coming from different sorts of academic subject arenas. I’m wondering if your relationship to an object, you’d have the material culturalist, you have the anthropologist, you have the art historian, you have the design historian, and those sort of notions of appropriate crucial language must be something that forms part of your curating interests.

Helen Rees Leahy

Yes for sure, and I thought what was really interesting in the way in which you framed the question is that relationship between the spatial context and a kind of textual context. I don’t necessarily see those as being … I don’t think you can disentangle them can way. Just thinking it through in terms of what you were saying, listening to Peter picking up what you just said, Polly, that I think they are entangled and, you know, they reproduce each other as it were. And I thought the word that you used, legitimacy, was a very interesting one, because I think that’s separate from authority, and in a sense, when we think about the voice of the artist drawing or the designer’s drawing, these in a sense are the voices of authority, but there are other voices that have legitimacy, and that for me is the voice of the person who walks their dog every day at YSP or remembers when the Manchester Art Gallery bought the Stubbs painting in the 1970s or whenever it was.

So in other words I think there are different discourses of legitimacy which are kind of unofficial as a sociologist would say, as well as the kind of the official voices of authority, and I think they too form part of the context and hugely enrich it. And that’s where audience kind of comes back into play all the time, doesn’t it.

Lesley Millar

There is also the language of making.

Helen Rees Leahy

Absolutely. Yes. There’s obviously a danger that these languages or these conversations become mutually exclusive, existing in separate kind of silos and compartments, but we could do so much more to enrich everything that we do in terms of practice in terms of theorization, if only we can bring them into play with each other.

Maxine Bristow speaking from the perspective of a practitioner

A couple of general observations I guess that are reiterating some of the points that have been made. For me there are probably two key issues, one of which I think is the sense of discovery that Polly talked about. That sense of being surprised by new configurations, new interpretations of things, and those often come through dialogues either in a physical way, things being re-configured in different spaces, or dialogues through interpretations of configuration with other kind of … from a textual point of view. So, and that links also to Michael’s issue of theme-based. It’s seeing things afresh through seeing new meanings or kind of new narratives coming through the interpretation of things.

The second issue for me is that business of establishing relationships. And, from an artist’s point of view being involved in the development of a project and not just being seen as delivering the work as an end project. Being involved with the curator, with the education team, taking responsibility for the way that the work is seen and the artist being very much involved in that as a kind of team effort.

Sonja Andrew, University of Manchester

I’m also doing a part time PhD at Central St Martin’s which is all about textiles as communication, and one of the questions that it’s exploring is how people read textiles within different contexts, and if changes of context mean changes of interpretation of the meaning of the work and the perception of the viewer. And one of the questions I suppose I’d like to raise that might be more appropriate for the website is the idea of interior and exterior space and how we perceive those spaces. Does moving from sculpture in a gallery space, where you are walking on a concrete floor and you can’t touch it, and moving outside onto grass where you can involve yourself with the tactile qualities of the objects, how does that change the perception of the sculpture.

Textiles particularly is a very tactile medium, but textile art, because it is within the paradigm I suppose of fine art, is displayed in a certain way, and it’s displayed in a non-tactile way often, where the viewer cannot interact with the textual qualities of the textile object. So I suppose it’s just a variety of questions really about how people think textiles should be displayed, and also about the public and the private, where we move into a gallery space like the Whitworth in a way we are moving into a space where we need permission to go into that space. It is closed off to us at certain times of the day. We cannot touch the objects, there’s very little interaction with the objects. But in an exterior environment, in the landscape, the viewer has a completely different perception of their relationship to the object. And I just wondered what … if people agree with that, or what they think about it.

Bob White, Chief examiner for Edexcel and the International Baccalaureate

Two areas I’d like to address. One is that there’s certainly a new audience for all forms of visual arts, and these are coming from youngsters who are, as a result of the new examination structure, are being involved with going to galleries and so on. That actually has brought about a whole area of concern, and that is the language that these youngsters are using to address their visits. They need a whole raft of critical and intellectual language that is appropriate. And, to that end we’ve been working extremely hard and the teachers across the country have been working very hard. But it is difficult to transfer that critical and contextual language that will enable students to understand and describe what they have seen. We hope that the number of students which actually visit galleries will grow, and this does seem to be happening. I think that we can see across the country the enormous numbers of students now going to galleries, and other sites too which might be appropriate with all their sketchbooks and attendant material.

Peter Murray

Can I come back on, it’s a very interesting question, about the whole business of how you read textiles. It’s how you read art and how you read sculpture, and I agree with you, I think there are similarities in terms of textiles, between sculpture and textiles, the tactile nature, you know, generally speaking is so important. But it does raise a lot of issues, because as we develop our indoor spaces we become much more aware of these issues, because generally speaking, well, never mind generally speaking, I mean people are allowed to touch sculptures at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the open air. But often in the galleries they are not allowed to do that. And it is a real problem because you’re outside and you’re touching a William Turnbull and you go inside and you touch a William Turnbull and you get your hand chopped off - within the space of a yard. And so it is quite a … it’s a difficult one.

Now we have had exhibitions, indoor exhibitions where people can touch the works, it depends on the nature of the work, depends on who owns the work, all these things. And I must say over the years it has presented me with all sorts of problems when we’ve been doing major shows and been borrowing work from art galleries and museums. And it is a real problem how you display them because the protection of the work is the most important thing, not the actual viewing of the work. And I’ve seen so many exhibitions which have been ruined, totally, totally ruined by barriers around the work, and we had them in the William Turnbull exhibition, we had to put railings around some of the works because we borrowed them and that was part of the agreement.

So it’s not just the tactile, I mean the visual I felt was ruined as well. And for people who organize major … who direct major museums with vast collections, it obviously is a real problem, I mean it’s a practical problem and also I think it’s a philosophical problem as well, because if you take someone like Henry Moore, who spent all his life trying to create these textures so people could actually feel and touch them, and then he gives this huge gift to the Tate and as soon as those pieces went over the doorstep of the Tate you’re not allowed to experience that aspect of the work.

Now I’m not saying that the Tate is wrong, but it is interesting when an artist actually has a particular thing that they want to do through their work for the public or for the viewer, and then the public and the viewer are not allowed to actually experience that and participate in that. I would have thought it’s even more problematical in textiles, which generally speaking is probably more fragile than patinations.

Lesley Millar

The exhibition I just curated, which is a Japanese textiles, functional textiles by the designer Reiko Sudo. She actually says that she wants her textiles to be experienced by all five senses. And, I mean, in a sense she does want you to lick them and to smell them and all the rest of it. Her textiles are eminently touchable and everybody who walked into the gallery wants to touch them, but of course in terms of sheer visitor numbers this just isn’t possible. So what we’ve done is provide touch samples for every single textile in the exhibition. This has been hugely appreciated by the people who have visited the exhibition. It’s just a very simple thing. And also a very salutary lesson for people visiting the exhibition, because now 14,000 people later I can actually demonstrate to the visitors what happens when 14,000 people touch a piece of textile, and you can actually see the trace elements of that touching. So that’s very useful.

In response to notions of audience, textiles are known to have an audience, huge audiences. . And this is great, we know that audience is out there. However, it actually, in a strange kind of way when I say to people that the exhibitions that I have organized have generated a quarter of a million visitors, in a way it’s almost seen to demean the exhibition or to make the textiles seem of less worth, because it’s seen to be populist. And, whereas if I think about the sort of blockbuster exhibitions like the Sensation, those visitor figures which are quoted as being huge, unexpectedly large initially, seem to be used to validate the quality of the exhibition, that what a discerning avant garde public we have out there. When I quote the visitor figures for any one of the exhibitions that I’ve organized or other exhibitions, the audience is seen to be of less worth.

How we turn the perception of a textile audience from being populist into being a discerning public I think would be very interesting. And I think that has to do with context. It’s where it’s seen. We do actually value work by the context in which it’s seen.

Polly Binns

To take on certain sorts of approaches strategies leading on into the website into the next seminar, I want to try and draw together a few threads. I think there are four areas that seem to be overlapping as constants in the way we’re discussing the examples and practice of experience and expressing concerns. Offered in no order of priority, they each seem relevant to contexts for work in respect of space, place, critical context, experience and relationship

1) How important it is not to view the ‘audience’ in the collective sense. It is not a benign entity. We have to not only identify new audiences but also identify how to offer them points of connection.
2) A need to acknowledge both the work/artefact and the artist as an interventionist. The manner in which a work develops and then exists, the journey, is as important as the end result.
3) Appropriate critical language is important but must not create compartmentalisation or confine perceptions to work. Objects cannot be confined by the ‘authority’ of words. We need to take and work with critical language and discourses from across many subject disciplines.
4) There is a need to identify appropriate brokerage to support best practice. My take on this is the difficulty of strategies for collaboration whether applying for funding from the public arts sector or to academic research funding schemes.

Those are the sort of things I feel we’ve been negotiating. If I really missed something, and this is what I’m concerned I might, please do comment in this last ten minutes .

Jessica Hemmings, writer

Speaking as a writer really in response to the comments about both audience and dialogue. It seems like a lot of the things that have been addressed this afternoon really need to be ideas and discussions that get out into the broader press and are published. And I speak only from personal experience that it is very, very hard to get information about textiles into a broader field of journalism. I think that the publications that we have at the moment that are specific to textiles tend to be incredibly polite and the number of times what it published is nowhere close to the first draft of what I’ve written, and what I’ve written is maybe more difficult, and I found the comments about the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and some of the difficult artists that you work with and people that sound like they really fight for what they want and it sounds like there’s a dialogue that might in some ways be a little bit more dynamic than what we’re experiencing in textiles at the moment is something that we need to take on board.

I don’t know how to answer the question about how you get textiles recognized within the broader field of journalism. It seems key to widening the audience. But there’s a huge, huge problem with how writing gets into those types of newspapers and broader magazines. It’s not a key that I’ve unlocked yet, but it does seem like it would be something that would definitely help the problem when it comes to how this knowledge get out into a broader audience.

Andy Horn, Craft Space in Birmingham

Going back to really what Lesley’s original objectives means for this whole programme, it seems to me which is about questions about status, and raising the status of textiles through a series of pathways that come out of all of this. And in a sense, textiles, is, in some sense in that can double bind within crafts because it doesn’t have a market, or very little, and if you go to Chelsea or Collect it’s missing. In some sense it’s missing because it has such a big amateur market, who make things, and yet you knocked your visitor number there but of course it’s a very knowledgeable market, that older generation, my mother’s generation who had enormous skills and recognition and understanding of textiles, and I’m interested how the market now for textiles, which I think is very strong and very knowledgeable because it’s got that richness of amateur traditions in it, how that interest moves onwards into younger generation. Because since we’re moving from a skills based society to one which is very image based. And that could probably work both ways in terms of there’s a need for that. We work very closely with a lot of audiences of different ages and so you begin to recognise the different points at which they’re coming at, for textiles.

And so as a consequence I feel in a way that you’re right in the sense that the way to raise status, which is an issue that’s current across all of crafts at the moment, is this, is its lack of infrastructure, which has been recognized by the Arts Council and Crafts Council, infrastructure because there’s no second hand auction market as there is say for ceramics which raises its status. And so you’re not feeding into that. There’s obviously a lack of critical writing and lack of critical dialogue, but the kind of example of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park is that you have a context which is quite informative in a sense that those objects outside have a kind of performance because they interact with the landscape, and the landscape is always changing, and it gives them a dynamic, and often objects within a museum environment are sometimes quite I think disadvantaged because of the baggage of the museum environments. And so I’m interested in a way that Sue Lawty’s residency at the V&A, picking up from the way it was represented in the media, how you found things about it, gave it quite an interesting position, and it’s seemingly a very kind of exciting model of way of working, that captured a kind of public imagination. And that seems to me obviously quite a significant way to move within textiles, because it’s limited by certain parameters.

Peter Murray

Could I ask a question. Is this a particular British problem we’re talking about, in terms of the recognition or lack of recognition of textiles, I mean is it peculiar to this country or is it an international …

Lesley Millar

I just came back from Austria and there was huge national interest in the Nuno exhibition with national TV and the lot. But my experience is only really here and in Japan and the position of textiles in Japan is quite different to how it is here. But in the end what we’ve got to deal with is what is here.

Maureen Wayman

We were just saying we don’t recognise some of the concerns about textile and its status, and thought is this a Manchester thing do you think. Thinking about what you were saying about histories, I mean everybody knows that you still can’t move in Manchester without tripping over either a piece of textile equipment, fabric, records, stores, everywhere you look in Manchester it’s there. And it’s something that I think you possibly do take for granted a lot of the time within the Universities in Manchester. There’s a huge array of different programmes that attract thousands of students to Manchester, to actually study textiles. In all of their forms ………… within schools of art, schools of design or wherever, I mean now, within my university we have three floors of textiles, you know, a vast amount of space. We want people to come in because we’ve got great machinery, we’ve got great students, we just want them to come in and use everything we’ve got, we want to share in it because we need to be generous, and be that people from the guilds, who have wonderful skills, but, you know, can we help them in terms of the aesthetics that we talked about earlier, which are important, so again so I think we should. We could and we should. But I think that perhaps in Manchester we’re in a slightly different position because that sort of legacy, that textile legacy I think is as strong there as it ever was, and I think we’ve got tons of stuff here that we just need to share with everyone because it’s here for everybody.

Jennifer Harris

I was just going to add to that it never occurred to me that I couldn’t have prime spaces for textiles in Manchester art galleries, it never occurred to me.

Lesley Millar

You know, Jennifer, that you are quite a rarity at the Whitworth, where else is there that would take that approach, where can you tour your textile exhibitions?

Maureen Wayman

It’s the Manchester factor. In Manchester when the art college moved from this building and came to Cavendish Street where still is, and we have a magnificent gallery in the Grosvenor building, which was built as the textile court. It was not built for anything other than textiles. Now it’s for all sorts of things, but it was purpose built as a textile court.

Polly Binns

I’m going to bring our discussion to an end. Can I encourage everybody to keep on communicating, keep on talking on the website. Lesley is very, very urgently asking people to carry on this discussion and if you wish contributions can be anonymous. Do not feel if you’re talking on a website the whole world is going to pick up on what you’re saying and hold you to it. But we do need to carry on as we are far flung around the country, we do need … to be able to get together like this is an exception. We do need to keep communicating so please do use the website.

top